Neural labeled LDA: a topic model for semi-supervised document classification

Recently, some statistical topic modeling approaches based on LDA have been applied in the field of supervised document classification, where the model generation procedure incorporates prior knowledge to improve the classification performance. However, these customizations of topic modeling are limited by the cumbersome derivation of a specific inference algorithm for each modification. In this paper, we propose a new supervised topic modeling approach for document classification problems, Neural Labeled LDA (NL-LDA), which builds on the VAE framework, and designs a special generative network to incorporate prior information. The proposed model can support semi-supervised learning based on the manifold assumption and low-density assumption. Meanwhile, NL-LDA has a consistent and concise inference method while semi-supervised learning and predicting. Quantitative experimental results demonstrate our model has outstanding performance on supervised document classification relative to the compared approaches, including traditional statistical and neural topic models. Specially, the proposed model can support both single-label and multi-label document classification. The proposed NL-LDA performs significantly well on semi-supervised classification, especially under a small amount of labeled data. Further comparisons with related works also indicate our model is competitive with state-of-the-art topic modeling approaches on semi-supervised classification.